One of the most surprising and uplifting docs I caught on the fest circuit last year, Stacey Tenenbaum's The Art of the Shine showcases shoeshiners from New York to Toronto, and from Tokyo to Sarajevo, where the profession is alternately an artisanal craft, a way to make a buck, a meditative art, a healing practice, and a means of connecting with one's fellow man. Documentary is thrilled to have had the opportunity to speak with one longtime practitioner of the shine, Kevin Tuohy, founder of A Shine & Co.—soon to be rebranded The Shoeshine Guild—whose master craftwork you can experience for
Latest Posts
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering today, Monday, April 9 on Topic is Darius Clark Monroe's Black 14, a documentary short telling the story of what happened when a group of University of Wyoming football players decided to protest racial injustice in 1969. Premiering tonight on Smithsonian Channel is Waco: The Longest Siege. It began as a raid, turned into a 51-day standoff, and ended with the destruction of a five-story building and 75 people dead. The 1993 Waco siege of the compound belonging to
Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! At T he Washington Post, filmmaker Paul Stekler reflects on the real meaning of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Mountaintop speech. Most Americans are familiar with the last 60 seconds of the speech, with its famous declarations "I've been to the mountaintop" and "I've seen the promised land." But the full speech
In 1999, Bill Clinton was president. Tablets and smart phones had yet to be unleashed on the world, and streaming was in its nascent stages as a platform. That was also the year of the first Realscreen Summit. Three hundred people attended. Agents did not roam the halls. It cost about $500 to register. Washington, DC was just emerging as a major nonfiction center. Reality TV was about a year away from barnstorming the airwaves with Big Brother and Survivor. Amazon was still primarily known as an online bookseller, and Netflix was renting out DVDs by mail. And Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering tonight, Monday, April 2 on HBO is King in the Wilderness, which chronicles the final chapters of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, revealing a conflicted leader who faced an onslaught of criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. Premiering tonight on Independent Lens is Till Schauder's When God Sleeps, a rap-punk-rock documentary about Iranian musician Shahin Najafi, who is forced into hiding after hardline clerics issue a fatwa for his death, incensed
Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! At IndieWire, Chris O'Falt investigates the role Facebook plays in helping indie filmmakers build community, and the results aren't pretty. Until recently, indie filmmakers viewed building a Facebook community as essential to success. That's a belief they’d like to maintain — but it's now extremely difficult
Now in its 17th year, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)'s Doc Fortnight 2018 showcased "outstanding and innovative nonfiction film from around the world." Curated for its first 15 years by Assistant Curator Sally Berger, the showcase was guest-curated the last two years by filmmaker/educator/programmer Kathy Brew. Brew distinguishes the event from other documentary showcases as targeted for the public and not "Hollywood on the Hudson." With MoMA's mission to celebrate film as an art form, and holding the "strongest international film collection in the US," Doc Fortnight aims to identify quality
For any young aspiring filmmaker, entering the world of documentary can be a challenging endeavor. And if you're a person of color, or have limited financial means, or are part of another historically marginalized community, then entering this seemingly esoteric field becomes even more daunting. It requires understanding the business realities of the industry, as well as having support systems to help you develop projects while staying true to who you are and the stories you're trying to tell. When we launched NeXt Doc in 2016, our goal was to provide space for young documentary filmmakers
Finding refuge from the cacophony of New Frontier in the basement of the Kimball Art Center, I sat down with Chief Curator Shari Frilot to discuss her selection process for the Sundance Film Festival's impressive lineup of independent experimental media works. Frilot also touched on the incredibly diverse array of New Frontier Films and Performances and how the introduction of three new venues is changing the architecture of New Frontier. What’s your overall assessment of the work this year at New Frontier? Shari Frilot: This field is amazing. I think the ability of the artists to wrap their
Documentary Virtual Reality (VR) has finally arrived. Among the 24 projects being exhibited at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier program of experimental media, three exhilarating documentary VR experiences stood out above the rest and showed how, at last, VR's promise is now being fulfilled. The three pieces are: Awavena, Lynette Walllworth's dazzling follow-up to her landmark VR piece Collisions; Zikr: A Sufi Revival, from VR pioneer Gabo Arora and his co-creators, who have demonstrated the first significant social VR documentary experience; and Hero, from the team behind 1979